Events

Engaging Refugee Narratives: Perspectives from Academia and the Arts

Publication date:
26 May 2017

Start:
Jun 16, 2017 9:30:00 AM
End:
Jun 17, 2017 5:30:00 PM

Engaging Refugee Narratives explores how narratives by and about refugees and migrants are
disseminated, how ideas become shared and meaningful to a larger group, how
influence builds. The three sessions of this event focus on digital forms of
communication and online archiving, graphic memoir and cartooning, varied forms
of live performance of telling stories.

Rupture

Publication date:
25 January 2017

Start:
Feb 13, 2017 9:00:00 AM
End:
Feb 15, 2017 5:00:00 PM

How to think a world experienced as turmoil? And how far might that sense of turmoil - of a world apparently running away with itself - be conceived as an occasion for anthropological thinking to break with itself? We take the concept of rupture as the lens that brings into focus an urgent concern with radical change. Linking the possibility of a new departure with a deliberate break with existing orders, rupture thematises disavowal, negation and violence as constituents or moments that are immanent to the production of difference. It thus lends a harder edge to the talk of novelty, creativity and emergence with which anthropological and broader theoretical theorizing, reflecting global trends in social discourse, is currently awash. Counterpoising the dynamics of event, eruption, disruption, radical critique and brutal affirmation to the more organic language of potentiality, collaboration, resilience and transformation, our concern with rupture seeks to make a break for anthropology, and perhaps with it, too.

Cosmologies of destiny: One-day workshop on the ethnography of predestination, temporality & freedom

Publication date:
26 May 2015

Start:
Jun 30, 2015 9:00:00 AM

What
does it mean to live a life that has already been written? How does one
understand the past and prepare for the future when superior forces mingle with
human agency? Distinctly from notions of fortune and coincidence, ‘destiny’
evokes conceptions of human lives and futures that are pre-determined: be it by
high political powers, cosmic forces, or transcendental entities.

The Subjectivity of the Body in Mental Health: An Anthropological Workshop

Publication date:
20 May 2015

Start:
May 28, 2015 10:00:00 AM
End:
May 29, 2015 4:00:00 PM

In recent years there has been a lot of
debate about subjectivities and mental health. The forming of the self through techniques
has subsequently given new angles on research of the formation of selves
through bodily and mental practices. Some of those studies, however, tend
towards a hidden essentialism – body and mind as the instruments that are used
to act upon an assumed self. On the other side of the spectrum, studies of
subjectivity assume that the subject is ephemeral, immaterial, a thing of the
law, language or the mind alone. If we do not challenge this assumption, we
might easily fall into the trap Foucault cautioned against when he called the
soul a prison of the body.

Risk, Embodiment and Health Technologies

Publication date:
17 June 2014

Start:
Jun 27, 2014 9:30:00 AM

A One day workshop hosted by Biosocialities, Health and Citizenship RRG
and the SMS network

The Biosocialities, Health and Citizenship reading and research group
utilizes theoretical and empirically informed discussions of ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow
1996, Rose and Novas 2001, Gibbon and Novas 2008, Nugyen 2007, Petryna 2002 )
as a starting point for critical engagement with questions around the global
expansion of a range of medical technologies and questions of citizenship. We explore how, and to what extent, different
technologies and forms of medical intervention become grafted onto, or informed
by, articulations of citizenship and what the scope (and limits) are of these
theoretical orientations for understandings the relationship between medical
technology and identity in a variety of diverse cultural contexts.

Special Film Showing and Discussionwith Filmmaker Zeynep Gürsel

Coffee Futures (Neyse
Halim Çiksin Falim)

Human Co-operation at UCL

Publication date:
23 August 2013

Start:
Sep 17, 2013 10:00:00 AM
End:
Sep 17, 2013 5:00:00 PM

A meeting, convened by Ruth Mace, UCL Anthropology, to
present and discuss work on a range of approaches to understanding proximate
determinants and ultimate evolutionary causes human co-operation (broadly
defined). Talks include empirical, experimental and theoretical work on topics
ranging from parochial altruism, punishment, prosociality and kinship and its
role in promoting human co-operation. Speakers include those working at UCL,
visitors, and collaborators, from anthropology, biology, computer science and
other disciplines.